EDUCATION TO BE A PERSON

Written by Darina Nikolaeva, psicòloga i col·laboradora de la Fundació Espavila - Published on the 21 December 2010

But what is life? What is being a person? It's important to ask this question because the answer is the basis of education, and the answer implicitly guides educational acts.

"We need an education that is part of life, returns to life." (Isabel Carrillo, 2007)

But what is life? What is being a person? It's important to ask this question because the answer is the basis of education, and the answer implicitly guides educational acts.

Or we can ask it in reverse: What concept of life and of person is there at the base of education today? We can infer it in reflecting on the current social and educational scene: we hear talk about an educational crisis and a crisis of values, teachers are in daily conflicts between students, parents complain about not knowing what to do with troubled children, isolation, addiction, childhood diseases and disorders...

This situation should make us ask ourselves how we have been focusing on education and the training of people: What has been given priority? What aspects of the person have we forgotten?

We should go to the root of the problem, because everything else is just symptoms.

So that people know how to have healthy relationships, we have to learn to become independent individuals, to have the opportunity to think for ourselves and to make our own mistakes. To learn to think, we need the opportunity to think, to reason and to question what is given as established. To learn to manage our emotions, we need space to feel them, acknowledge them and we need to embrace ourselves without disapproval. To be peaceful, we need to learn that violence breeds more violence and there are other ways of resolving conflicts. Without drugs, we need to learn that life is to live and to grow, to become better and to meet life itself. To love, we have to be loved and to learn to love well.

We are talking about an education designed to teach us to live and to be a person before anything else, an education aimed at developing the whole person.

We need a review of education. It’s necessary stop on the way to realize what society we are creating and to make a critical analysis as a starting point and to know where we started. And to start acting. We are looking back only to decide where we want to go and what kind
of world we want create.

We don’t want to lament or constantly ask why either. The key question is: what kind of society do I want? And contribute through education. Major changes must begin with yourself and the immediate surroundings.